MTG Salvation

Quote from Thirtydirtybirds »

It might be a bit too technical of a deck idea for you, but look into pox type decks. You could do a budget version for pretty cheap. Rips things out of his hand, destroys his resources, and starves him out of the game, all while you benefit.

If you want to go into other colors, I'm just gonna throw this card out there ALUREN. Again maybe a bit technical, but you can do crazy things with it. It's pretty available, and cheap. I could see some cool black/green shenanigans with that.

I don't get the impression that anything will be "too technical" for LittlePill. Does it take time to learn timing and strategy with a pox deck if you're new to the archetype? Sure, but it already sounds like she enjoys mono-black and discard.

Yes, you can, because Extort triggers when you cast a spell. Whether it resolved or not is irrelevant.

Most of the cards I would mention are cards that have already been mentioned, but I would like to expound upon their brokenness with Phenax.

Eater of the Dead is broken with Phenax alone, as you've noticed. You might have to prime graveyards with a few creatures (even if it's your own) before Eater comes down, but he can easily mill out a table by himself. This is the kind of situation where milling yourself a bit with everybody else via something like Mesmeric Orb is really handy.

Intruder Alarm turns on a number of ridiculous synergies with or without Phenax. You get to mill and make stupid numbers of tokens with Ghoulcaller Gisa with a ridiculous efficiency of your black mana, particularly if you can mill with the zombies immediately. Bloodline Keeper provides some air defense and goes infinite with Alarm. Undead Alchemist and Elixir cleared out more than one library in a game, just because I kept hitting creature cards. Curse of the Swine takes on another dimension of usefulness with Alarm.

My friends hate to see King Macar, the Gold-Cursed on the field because they know I run tappers like Springleaf Drum to give me a non-combat way of tapping my Inspired creatures. I once milled out two players' 80-85 card libraries because Macar had Slagwurm armor and Freed from the Real on him. Those Gold tokens just kept it going as long as there were creatures to target. Wiping the board while milling is great. Huge target on your head afterward, though.

If you run Disciple of Deceit, you only need to memorize the cmc of your "solution" cards at first.

Also, don't discount resource denial and control. You need to protect your stuff, so making your opponents discard can be handy. And some creatures like Surgespanner or Spellskite can help mill and control. (The latter is hilarious against Uril.)

You may need to exile pesky cards: Withered Wretch, Praetor's Grasp, Extract, etc.

Untap tricks like Domineering Will, Turnabout, Breaking Wave can help tactically as well as help finish someone off.

If you use a toughness boost with untapping, such as Triton Tactics or Umbral Mantle, activate it in response to the mill ability activation, since that checks the toughness on resolution.

Rather than Illusionist's Bracers (or in addition) you might consider Rings of Brighthearth.

For pillow forting, I have not found Riddlekeeper to be very dissuasive, especially against voltron or graveyard decks. I prefer Propaganda, Dissipation Field, No Mercy, Silent Arbiter, Crawlspace, Meishin, the Mind Cage.

Draw-milling via cards like Memory Jar, Jace's Archivist, and Forced Fruition is a valid strategy, too.

If you mill lightly at first, especially with triggers (such as Memory Erosion), it helps get rid of the top 20-30% of a deck while you set up for tap-milling the rest. Players in my meta, for example, don't mind 2 cards here and there, but there does come a point where they notice the size of their graveyard is approaching the size of their remaining library and start wanting you dead.

Quote from PhroX »

Quote from Carthage »

This is empirically false. The existence of the edh ban list is a perfect example. It's not a good time if someone casts a card like limited resources.

I hate apologists who think that just because a card sees print it makes for a good game. They aren't better players for just accepting every card as legitimate. Apply some simple thought to how people will react to a given card.

This card for example:
-They can't block it
-If there is a haste enabler, only instant speed removal works. Two of the most played cards in commander are haste enablers( lightning greaves and swiftfoot boots
-Even if they have instant speed removal, it's very possible they tapped out for some threat because you can't answer an entire multiplayer table.
-Then it taps to do 27 damage. Clearly WAY over the normal intended effect for a tap, so you are just taking advantage of a stupid rule difference. In normal games, letting this thing tap nets you 7 damage to the opponent, which is much more in line with what you'd expect from a 4 mana card.
-Even if you don't die immediately after, your whole gameplan for the rest of the game is messed up because your life total is so low, so there are tons of options you can no longer take.

Overall it's a very, very poor card to play against and should not be included by anyone who wants a table to have fun.

Even cards like limited Resources aren't inherently unfun. It depends how they're used - i.e. it depends on the players. That's not to say I think it should be unbanned, but that ultimately, everything comes down to the people playing not the cards they're using. And frankly, it's a lot less fun to play against someone who is constantly whining and *****ing and trying to force their personal interpretation of how a format is supposed to be played upon everyone else than it is playing against any card with decent people.

As for this particular one, wow. It's really not that impressive. So I lost 27 life. Big deal. If you're playing "competitively", you should be glad you didn't lose all your life to an infinite combo, and if you're playing "casually", you've got plenty of time to recover given the slowness of the typical casual EDH game.

And hell, stupid effects like this are exactly what drew many people to the format in the first place.

Exactly. I'm eager to throw this in my Phenax deck just to be able to mill for 13. If its own tap ability is necessary, great. Otherwise it's a great rattlesnake to eat some of the targeted removal my meta runs. It's the same reason I run Ashiok in the deck. I never actually have activated Ashiok's second or third abilities, but it'll distract opponents that irrationally dislike planeswalkers and eat some attacks. That's value to me for 3 mana.

No. Because it says "creature" and not "creature card", it means a creature on the battlefield.

Very short game. Full 4-player pod and I kept a hand with Warstorm Surge, Gamble, Springleaf Drum, and 4 mountains.

1. Mountain. Gamble for Genesis Chamber, losing Warstorm.
2. Mountain. Norin and the Drum.
3. Drew Purphoros. Mountain. Genesis Chamber.
4. Mountain. Purphoros.

Went around a couple times more with no answers, so it was quickly decided to scrap the game and start another.

Going to test for a while with Word of Seizing in for Zealous Conscripts (trying to eliminate infinite combos from my decks), Dualcaster Mage in for Crucible of Worlds, and basics in place of the 4 fetches I was running. Valakut stays for now.

And it occurs to me that I've never used Outrage Shaman.

Quote from kalkris »

Anywho, 28 days isnt a month unless it's February. And it's not February. How have your games with the Almighty been lately?

Last one was pretty good. Two opponents. Kept a hand that included Cloudstone Curio, Gauntlet of Power, Beetleback Chief, 1 mountain, and Haunted Fengraf. So I mostly used Warstorm Surge, Cloudstone, and Beetleback to keep burning things off the board and whittling at my opponents. Then I put Purphoros on the board. In the meantime, blue player has been milling everybody with Sphinx's Tutelage and keeps dumping my other enchantments in my graveyard. Blue player casts Talent of the Telepath for my top 7 and only hits Chaos Warp. They target Purphoros and I get Honor-Worn Shaku. Okay. Then their milling helps me draw Purphoros again 2 turns later. Cast him and Beetleback. Next turn I simply cast Beetleback, bouncing him with one of the tokens and cast him again to finish them off.

My mana sources at the end (Gauntlet helped a lot) was 4 mountains, Fengraf, Shaku, and Mind Stone.

It seems to me from this game that spreading damage around evenly between my opponents (trying to keep them evenly diminishing), not completely decimating their creatures (just keeping the real threats and combo pieces off the board), and letting them nibble at my life a little bit with the remaining creatures helped keep a target off my face. Blue player was milling with Tutelage evenly between myself and the other opponent. And aside from Warping my Purphoros my board state went rather unchecked.

When I milled out 2 out of my 3 opponents in the same phase with my Phenax deck. Had Phenax on the board, of course, but the Uril player had a bunch of utility creatures out and I had King Macar with Slagwurm Armor and Freed from the Real. So I tapped him to mill 9, spent U to untap, then kept using his Gold tokens and my remaining few U sources to keep milling. The other milled opponent's last act was to Mortify Macar.

The remaining opponent was in a weak position and I'd held Duskmantle Guildmage and Colossus of Akros in my hand, which finished his 32 life two turns later.

The rush from the realization of using the Gold tokens to continue milling was the exhilarating part.

Quote from mineralica »

and he didn't check when the aligned hedron network failed.

Well, he was kinda busy at that point.

The correct answer to a barbarian's riddle is to choke on your cleverness and die.
-- Stranglehold

Runner up: Goblin Assassin

I think you should only scoop if it's not detriment to someone else's play.
I used to run a Phenax, God of Deception deck and I used to have player spite scoop on me.
I'd mill player 1 hard with something like wight or precinct six and as I swing in with an unblockable consuming aberration on player 2, player 1 would scoop to stop my damage being lethal as his yard no long er exists.
It's abuse of rules.

I'll only scoop if I'm so far behind that I elongate the game by being there. If someone's making a play that they've worked hard to pull off and really thought about I think they deserve the gratification of it resolving rather than their target spite scooping.

If it's just a case of they threaten to scoop I do a minor thing then I 100% will do it.

Wouldnt mind if it was true..

As with a lot of my decks, I'm kind of conservative about wincons. In Phelddagrif, I'm obsessive about avoiding anything that might eclipse Phelddagrif himself, and for Kaervek I don't tend to want to run big X spells as a finisher. The reason for both, basically, is that I don't want people to think that we've got some nasty come-out-of-nowhere wincon that forces them to act against us early, before that wincon comes to fruition. Especially for something like the sac 10 on this, it's pretty telegraphed, so once people get to low-ish life they're probably likely to start sending everything our way. And the same is true for big exsanguinates, etc, which is why I don't generally run them (I'm conflicted about cut // ribbons, but it's just so damn powerful).

The way I want to win with this deck is generally to trap the last player(s) in a situation where they can't cast anything without dying, because they got too greedy and wanted to exploit kaervek as long as possible. Just getting people low-ish and then exploding them from 10+ life is kind of boring, imo. Plus the risk that they'll start killing kaervek while at higher life, for fear of a lethal burn spell.

Anyway, that's not to say it isn't potentially powerful in the deck, it's definitely powerful in general. Unfortunately we can't separate the future sight part from the fireball part. But also, 6 is kind of a lot. Really I think the goal is to get to 7-10 mana, 7 being enough for first cast, and 10 being enough to recur kaervek with VS and replay him. Once we're at that point, we're mostly interested in augmenting kaervek or setting up some alternative utility cards to do work. All that to say, by the time we're at 6 already, I'm not sure draw is all that important for us. I think I'd rather spend the mana on a tutor to get whatever it is that's going to work best with kaervek. In my experience, the deck consistently gets exactly where it wants to get without any draw.

The bottom line, really, though, is that I just don't like the card. For the same reason I don't like necropotence. They're both really powerful and paint a big target on your head, and both feel like they sort of take whatever cool incremental thing you were trying to do and replace it with how stupid busted they are. The deck may well be stronger with citadel (or with necro), but it wouldn't be as much of a Kaervek deck, if you get what I'm saying. I might try it, but honestly I'm really hoping it's bad.

Just one more and I'll take it easy for a while:

You're playing a rather conservative game, holding people at bay with Venser, the Sojourner (currently at 7), Cowardice, and Inferno Titan, bouncing the Titan and recasting it each turn to keep the board clear of threats. But the mono-green player has had enough, and dumps his ramped up mana into Genesis Wave for 20, hitting lethal power, a Reclamation Sage for the Cowardice, a Thragtusk, and both an Asceticism and a Glaring Spotlight with a whole bunch of forests just in case anyone gets any funny ideas about targeting their creatures. But you've got some funny ideas anyway, you use all your mana to fire off a flurry of spells like Memnite that amount to very little but increasing your storm count for a big Mind's Desire. You shuffle up and flip 8 free random spells: Detention Sphere, Nahiri, the Harbinger, Precursor Golem, Gilded Lotus, Catch // Release, Venser, Shaper Savant, Boros Signet, and Mirrorweave.

Easy challenge: get rid of all the creatures.

Hard challenge: kill the green player from 45 life!

Here's a fun one:

(Assume opponents can't cast spells, the order of the remaining library is irrelevant, and the library contains all the cards I love most)

You have Zedruu the Greathearted from turn 4, Vedalken Orrery from turn 5, and 6 lands in play on turn 6. You don't have much going on, so you cast Time Spiral in your main phase, untap your lands, and pass. After your opponents all tap out on their turns, you EOT flash in Knowledge Pool. From your deck you flip over Eye of the Storm, Firestorm, and a useless land. You draw for turn, and your hand is Turnabout, Howling Mine, Thousand-Year Storm, Razia, Boros Archangel, Ephemeral Shields, Barren Glory, and Echo Storm. Win before passing the turn.

I had the play made against me, but a guy cast Victimize sacrificing the Xantcha, Sleeper Agent I had given him. It was the art where Gix is actually dragging Xantcha to her death.

>:(

Quote from cyberium_neo »

By plan or accident, what do people believe to be the best designed legends for EDH format?

I find versatile legends like Shu Yun, the Silent Tempest, Taigam, Ojutai Master, and Varina, Lich Queen are the best, because they allow players to go different directions with them instead of just one. I also favor designs that allow you to shift your game depending on your opponents' decks, such as Grenzo, Havoc Raiser, The Mimeoplasm, Experiment Kraj, and Gonti, Lord of Luxury, they encourage malleable gameplays.

I also believe that deck-building is half of the fun, so legends with some some form of self-penalty, like Taigam, Sidisi's Hand, Malfegor, Rona, Disciple of Gix, and wacky ones like Brudiclad, Telchor Engineer, Arixmethes, Slumbering Isle, and Mairsil, the Pretender are great designs, because they force players to think further when they build decks.

I agree that the best commanders should be vital to a deck (i.e. not there for the colors or barely relevant to what the deck is trying to do), but at the same time be able to be built around versatilely. The other thing, as a corollary, to the versatility is that if I see a commander, I dont want to be able to guess more than a few non-EDH staples that would be in a deck. With many commanders, if you see it, you can usually guess what else is in the deck. Finally, does the commander emphasize linear or nonlinear gameplay.

I was pondering these things at work, it's like making puzzles. For the sake of making things difficult, I'm pretending my Rest In Peace got Preator's Grasped away.

So imagine this scenario: 9 lands, Zedruu the Greathearted, Crystalline Crawler, Vedalken Plotter, and Jeskai Ascendancy; and then your hand is Mirrorweave, Leave // Chance, Mirror of Fate, and Time Spiral; and your graveyard is Jeskai Charm. There are tons of options of neat and probably game winning lines from this spot, but it's actually already set with a deterministic win, no good luck or additional pieces necessary.

Quote from lyonhaert »

Quote from drippyCat »

I started writing a bunch but deleted it. I just realized that I don't actually know:
Is this thread just for toctheyounger77's list?
Or can it be used to discuss any/all Varina esper lists?

The convention as I understand it is that decklist threads in this subforum or more for the former (that user's list and approach to playing the commander), but a lot of general discussion of cards for that commander happen in these threads anyway. Often it brings some new ideas to the user or helps them refine where they draw the line on certain things.

Generally that's the convention. That being said, I haven't seen a whole lot of Varina lists about, so if this is the place where we unpack and theorycraft different approaches I'm totally cool with that. My list isn't going anywhere any time soon, and I've made it pretty clear what I'm aiming for, but I'm also absolutely happy to bounce ideas about and help others out with different angles and such

Quote from lyonhaert »

I don't quite understand and would love an example. Did you not have Rest in Peace down?

I did not have Rest in Peace down. I had Mirror of Fate and Eye of the Storm with Time Spiral and Leave // Chance. I had tapped out to get in that position, but Time Spiral untapped 6 lands, and because I had Time Spiral, I had no cards in graveyard and 7 cards in hand. I activated Mirror of Fate just to exile my library, then I cast I think Mirrorweave from hand to trigger Eye and recast Time Spiral, this time with 6 cards in hand and just Mirror in the graveyard, shuffle them in and draw all 7. But at this point I had myself in an awkward position, cause I only had 8 mana available, and I have cards in my hand I can't cast, so I use leave to bounce Chrome Mox to my hand and cast it exiling something down to 6 cards in hand and up to 9 mana. I cast and activate Mirror putting 2 Firestorm and Turnabout in my library, activate Mikororo to draw Firestorm, cast it with no targets using my last mana. 1 card in library, 1 in graveyard, 5 in hand, Time Spiral draws all 7. I've only got 6 mana to work with, and if I Turnabout, there will only be 6 cards left to draw with Time Spiral, but I've got Leave as well, so I do that, untapping all my lands and then bouncing Howling Mine to my hand and Time Spiraling redrawing the same 7 cards, but this time I have like 15 mana floating so I can use Mirror of Fate, play the 7 mana sorcery that's been stuck in my hand the whole time, and now I just want to set up Rest in Peace and Mind's Desire, but I need to draw both so I need to get some stuff out of my hand, and I need to keep enough mana around to do anything, and all of that can be done without using Leave // Chance but you have to be unreasonably careful to make sure you always have exactly 7 cards to draw with Time Spiral, but because I had Leave available I could just double check every time I trigger Eye of the Storm and make sure I have enough and if I don't, I bounce something I don't need to get up to 7. Like if I had 7 instants and sorceries in hand, I could play them all without needing to Mirror of Fate again by bouncing a permanent to replace each one that's eaten by Eye of the Storm to keep my handsize exactly constant. It's not so much making things possible that weren't before, it's just making them a lot less of a headache.

Figuring out a deterministic win from just Time Spiral and Mirror of Fate is by far the most difficult sequencing I've ever done in Magic: the Gathering, especially because how you redraw your cards and how you you keep exactly 7 available (so the shuffle doesn't screw you and the draw doesn't kill you) is different every time based on what you have in hand and in play to balance those things, and Leave (and Chance for that matter) can be a little grease to smooth out that process. Still, the best use of your time is to just say "I might be able to win without passing the turn, but to preserve my sanity, I'll just wait a turn and hope you still can't stop me then."